Tag: Freedom Of Assembly

As an Occupy Wall Street activist goes to trial on charges of assaulting a police officer, author and lawyer Chase Madar asks what the rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and freedom from warrantless search are worth in the United States today.

Independent journalist Kenneth Lipp attended a law enforcement conference in Philadelphia on Monday in which he discovered that soon authorities may have control over what’s posted on social media sites. This includes allowing people to plan demonstrations using sites such as Facebook.

Things like freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which seemed like a good idea in 1789, now seem really dangerous to us and we’ve started to agree with King George III about the undesirability of those liberties. Our forebears minded the torture and cruel and unusual punishments imposed by the king. But we have gone back to torturing people.

Three Chinese activists agitating for officials to make public the value of their wealth and assets will be put on trial in a “co-ordinated crackdown” that makes the limitations of an “anti-corruption push by the new government” plain, according to a Reuters report in The Guardian.

Neither Brookfield Properties nor the NYPD wants journalists asking questions about an unmarked truck that has been pointing a surveillance camera at protesters in Zuccotti Park for the past few weeks. So much so that a police officer declared journalist Nick Turse’s note-taking at the site to be illegal and ordered him to leave.